25 years ago, Tom Cruise starred in the strangest summer movie of all time

Tom Cruise is now known as an action star and “savior of cinema,” but in the late 1990s, the famous actor only worked on two movies: Magnolia, in which he had a supporting role, and Eyes Wide Shut. The latter, Stanley Kubrick’s final movie, is the one that drew people’s attention back then with its mysterious subject matter, prolonged production time, and provocative teasers.

Upon its posthumous release, Kubrick’s final film received mixed reviews and was the subject of innumerable censorship scandals. But 25 years later, Eyes Wide Shut has cemented its status among Kubrick’s lushest, most crowd-pleasing seriocomic masterworks — and as one of Cruise’s finest movies.

A dreamlike mirage

For the uninitiated, the common image of Eyes Wide Shut is a sexually provocative, danger-tinged frightfest – reductive, to say the least. The detail that best helps us to understand the film, which was (very) loosely based on the 1926 Austrian novel Traumnovelle, is its production style. Kubrick, who left America for the U.K. for good in 1961, shot his New York movie on a vast series of sets at London’s Pinewood Studios, eerie doubles for the streets of Kubrick’s birthplace, Lower Manhattan. The supposed Long Island mansion where our protagonist Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) witnesses a secret society’s grandiose orgy is in fact a composite of Mentmore Towers and Elveden Hall, two English country houses.

Eyes Wide Shut is painted in photorealistic brushstrokes – anyone who’s ever encountered an upwardly mobile and conspicuously rich young Manhattan family will recognize the types and environments on display here. But the film has little connection to reality; it occupies, in fact, a gonzo, baroque fantasyland, fitting for a film based on a book whose title translates to Dream Novel.

Contrasting elements made for public curiosity

One must remember, as well, the fever pitch of cultural intensity around star Tom Cruise and his leading lady Nicole Kidman, who were six years into their marriage and two of the world’s defining screen idols when filming began in November of 1996. (Kidman plays Alice, Bill’s pampered society wife.) Kubrick, who ultimately saw the film as a comedy, bought the rights to the novel in 1968, and over the years envisioned Steve Martin or Woody Allen for the lead role. As it turned out, he only began making the film 28 years later, returning to the screen following a decade-plus-long absence after directing his Vietnam diptych Full Metal Jacket.

The bizarre contrasting elements in the film’s background – a reclusive master auteur directing the world’s hottest mainstream stars, a Woody Allen role recast with Tom Cruise, a director who died during the nine-month postproduction process – created a public relations bonanza. It’s often forgotten that this weird and woolly film was, with its $162 million gross, one of the biggest summer blockbusters of 1999. (Movies it out-grossed that year include more traditional summer fare like Never Been Kissed, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, and The Iron Giant.)

An aesthetically perfect story of sexual jealousy

And what a blockbuster. Nearly three hours of riveting, gorgeous Christmas-inflected imagery kicked into action by Alice’s admission that she once fantasized about another man, Eyes Wide Shut treats male sexual jealousy not as a small and fleeting emotion but the way it actually feels – ghostly, otherworldly, capable of transfiguration. Over the course of two picaresque December days and nights (mostly nights), Bill explores – but ultimately decides against – prostitution, sex cults, and the hedonistic underbelly of ostensibly dignified old money.

Upon his reunion with his wife, in the reassuring light of day, Kubrick and Frederic Raphael’s brilliant script exposes this colossus of insecurity as a scarecrow as Bill slips seamlessly back into domestic bliss. Hearing the story of Bill’s Gulliverian travails, Alice tells Bill that there’s a simple solution to the mutual distrust that laid the groundwork for his nightmarish adventure. In other words, she puts things into perspective. “There is something very important that we need to do as soon as possible,” she says, her eyes relaxed into Kubrick’s classic frozen lake of expressionlessness. “Fuck.” This is the last line Kubrick ever put on film, and one of the great closers in cinema.

Kubrickisms

Other ubiquitous Kubrick touches? There’s the length of production – 15 months, including Vinessa Shaw’s one-scene hooker role taking two months to film and Alan Cumming, who only appears in a throwaway cameo role, being forced to audition six times.

Every color, every piece of costuming, the warmth of every light (and the lights in this film are very, almost counterintuitively, warm) had to be adjusted to Kubrick’s specifications.

Easter eggs and the ultimate moral

There’s also the Kubrickian Easter egg, a given for his post-The Shining (1980) films. In this case, one of the most famous is the suggestion, in the final scene, that Bill and Alice’s daughter, Helena (Madison Eginton), is kidnapped, without their knowing it, by the very secret society of which Bill earlier run afoul. This is, of course, subjective, happening largely on the periphery of the frame and seemingly a feature of Kubrick’s knowing tendency to give future film students grist to chew on for generations to come.

Whether, in fact, the film is making the point that the Harfords’ obliviousness goes so far as to ignore the well-being of their little girl is ultimately beside the point. The movie is about the magnification of small problems into enormous ones, about the perils of poking your head into a world not your own for no reason other than peevish curiosity and boredom. For all Kubrick’s capacity to evoke existential terror, the message, ultimately, is: “Be satisfied with what you have, you schmucks.” (Actually, in its way, it’s one of the great anti-infidelity movies.)

Critics were split

Critics didn’t uniformly embrace this great work upon its initial release; Martin Scorsese described it as “severely misunderstood.” It didn’t help that Warner Bros.digitally edited several sequences in order to avoid an NC-17 rating, which launched widespread outcry that the film was being altered contrary to its deceased director’s intentions. Ultimately, the changes don’t make too significant of an impact, but the unrated version was released on DVD in 2007 and is still available.

Eyes Wide Shut is a summer classic

At arthouse cinemas across the country, Eyes Wide Shut is considered a Christmas flick, playing alongside other films unconventionally fit for the season like Phantom Thread and Carol. But intentionally or not – the late delivery of the final cut and Kubrick’s premature death screwed things up somewhat – it’s actually, historically, a summer movie, and now is as good a time as any to watch a film that’s as hearty and fulfilling now as it was a quarter-century ago.

Eyes Wide Shut is streaming for free on Pluto TV.